Colares / Operação Prato

Starting in mid-1977, residents across the fishing communities of Colares island, on the Amazon delta north of Belém, began describing the same strange visitor: a silent light, sometimes disc-shaped, sometimes shaped like a giant flashlight, that appeared over rooftops and riverbanks at night. Locals named it "chupa-chupa," sucker-sucker, after what many said it did to them: hover close, fire a beam, and leave behind burns, punctures, and a lasting weakness. Mayor José Ildone Favacho Soeiro asked the Brazilian Air Force for help, and in September 1977 it opened Operação Prato ("Operation Saucer"), a Brazilian Air Force investigation of reported lights in Pará, documented in military records.

Captain Uyrangê Bolívar Soares Nogueira de Hollanda Lima led a small team of intelligence officers who spent roughly four months in Colares and thirty nearby villages, interviewing hundreds of witnesses and, according to the eventual case file, photographing the lights themselves on several occasions. Local hospitals reported an unusual run of patients with the same complaint: circular burns and reported blood loss with no obvious cause. Brazil's National Archives began receiving Air Force UFO records in 2008. The records include photographs, witness sketches and officer reports. They document an investigation and reported experiences, without establishing the cause of the lights or injuries. Hollanda, by then a colonel, broke a long public silence in August 1997, giving Brazilian ufologists a detailed interview about the operation. He died by suicide two months later, in October 1997, a death his interviewer and friend has attributed to a long-standing depressive illness rather than to anything he revealed, though the timing has kept speculation alive among some researchers regardless.

No chupa-chupa injury was ever independently linked to a specific physical cause, and Brazilian investigators at the time floated possibilities ranging from ball lightning to mass panic amplified by a genuine, unrelated illness moving through the same villages. What is unusual, and rarely disputed, is that a national air force devoted a sustained, multi-month field investigation to the claims rather than dismissing them outright, and that the resulting file was substantial enough to be worth declassifying decades later. Colares today leans fully into the story, marketing itself as "the city of ETs," with alien murals, an "Operação Prato" restaurant, and ET-themed guesthouses lining a town that spent the late 1970s convinced something was hunting it after dark.

Colares is north of Belém in Pará. The road approach uses BR-316, PA-140 and PA-238 toward the Penhalonga crossing. The municipality describes access by ferry and a bridge construction project. Confirm the current crossing arrangements, bus departures, fares and return service locally before traveling.

Confirm beach access and any visits to local study spaces directly with their hosts. No current opening schedule for a dedicated UFO museum has been verified. Pack repellent and sun protection.